PREFACE.

...for it is said that he never satisfied himself.*" And Vasari, like an echo of these first conflicts, would repeat the accusation and pass it down to posterity—justifying it, as Verini and the Anonymous writer Likely a reference to the "Anonimo Gaddiano," an early 16th-century biographer who wrote about Leonardo's life and works. had, through the concept of Leonardo's excessive inability to be satisfied.**

    Meanwhile, the cartoon of Adam and Eve in the Earthly Paradise, the Head of Medusa, and the Adoration of the Magi remained unfinished, "as happened in nearly all his affairs."

    In 1482, Da Vinci left Florence. The competition opened by the Duke of Milan for an equestrian statue of Francesco Sforza The founder of the Sforza dynasty in Milan; Leonardo spent years working on a massive clay model of this horse, which was never cast in bronze. was merely the incidental reason for this departure; it was, in reality, the result of his own poverty and the resentment he had stirred in others by taking on commissions and not bringing them to completion.*** The warmth with which the

Italian Historical Archive*. Florence, 1872, series III, vol. XVI, page 222.

** The Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects (Milanesi edition). Florence, Sansoni, 1879, vol. IV, page 22.

*** UZIELLI, Research concerning Leonardo da Vinci. Turin, Loescher, 1896, page 61.